The increasing size and complexity of the information technology (IT) needs of businesses force periodic upgrade of their IT infrastructures—in this context, software applications ranging from operating systems, middleware and end-user applications need to be migrated. The process associated with migration may range from simple to complex, depending on the number of elements which change during the upgrade—the most complex being a change in both the hardware and the type of operating system. Such a change typically necessitates a complete rebuilding of the middleware and end-user application stack to support the same business functions on the new platform.
Many tools exist that can assist in the migration process—from capturing the information on the old system, to automated analysis, provisioning and configuration of the new platform. However, most such tools help automate individual migration tasks, but leave significant gaps when approaching a typical server consolidation scenario, where the business is trying to simultaneously replace hundreds or even thousands of potentially geographically distributed servers. A seemingly trivial mis-step in the migration process may result in costly outages. However, given the complexity of the process of migration and the unknowns in terms of software compatibility and other factors, such mistakes may be unavoidable with current techniques.
Current techniques include Solaris™ migration tools for migrating from HPUX and HPTru64. Such tools are aimed at simplifying the migration process and reducing porting time. Examples of such tools include: (i) Solaris® (registered mark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.) operating system software OE analyzer for application/code migration, (ii) AMXW for automatically potting HP e3000 applications to UNIX platforms including Solaris® (registered mark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.) operating system software OS, and (iii) Transformix™ (mark of Transformix Computer Corporation of San Diego, Calif.) migration software for allowing migration of MPE/iX COBOL II applications to UNIX or Linux® (registered mark of Linus Torvalds of Portland, Oreg.) operating system software. However, these tools do not provide an over-arching consistent migration platform for tracking migration decisions that flow across the platforms—for example, mis-configuring a network adapter may also have collateral impact on the ability to access a database. Thus, addressing one migration problem requires an understanding of the migration decisions made over a period of time across multiple disparate applications—such coordination is not available in the state of the art tools available to practitioners.
It would be desirable to overcome the limitations in previous approaches.